Tupã

Storms in the Alto Paraná arrive from the west and give plenty of warning. The light under the canopy turns a bruised green, the air drops cold enough to raise the hair on a forearm, and out past the tree line comes a low dragging rumble, like something heavy being hauled across a wooden floor. Guaraní families in eastern Paraguay, in Misiones, in the forests of southern Brazil, have a name for whatever is making that noise. Tupã is coming from the west, and he is bringing the water.

Water is the whole of it. In the cosmogony the Mbyá-Guaraní recite, the first father Ñamandu unfolded himself out of the primordial darkness and then made four divine couples to share the running of the world: his own order, Karai of the sacred fire, Jakaira of mist and healing smoke, and Tupã, last of the four, with Tupã Chy Ete beside him. To this last son Ñamandu handed the rain. Tupã’s work is to fetch water from the stormy west and carry it east to Karai, whose country has none, and to let it fall along the way. He is also charged with cooling. The world runs hot, in fevers and tempers and drought alike, and Tupã is the one who brings the temperature down.

When the maize is failing, the people who carry his name go down to the stream. Every Mbyá person receives a ñe’ẽ, a word-soul, sent by one of the four divine couples, and whichever god sends it decides the child’s name and the order they belong to for the rest of their life. Those who came from Tupã wade in, splash, play loudly in the water, and ask him for rain while they are doing it.

That is not worship in any sense a missionary would have recognised. Grandmothers argue with him. One Mbyá woman remembered hers standing in a shaking doorway and shouting up at a squall, asking Tupã why he had to send a storm this size, whether he meant to take the roof as well. Asked whether Tupã was feared, she said yes, but in the good way. The good way meant staying quiet and not raising your voice while the storm went over.

No source describes what he looks like. Chroniclers, friars and ethnographers have written about Tupã constantly since the fifteen hundreds and not one of them gives him a body, because the people telling them about him do not give him one either. He is a noise, a change in the air, and a direction on the horizon. The rain is his, the flash is his, the west is where he lives, and past that the record simply stops. His iconography is honestly empty, and anything painted into it would be someone else’s invention.

The name did not stay empty. French visitors to the Tupinambá coast in the fifteen hundreds noted that when it thundered the people called on Toupan, and the Capuchin friar Claude d’Abbeville, at São Luís in 1614, wrote the word down and concluded with satisfaction that this Toupan was God. By 1639 the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, working in the Paraguayan reductions, had put the flattest possible entry into his Tesoro de la lengua guaraní: Tupã, the name they applied to God. He added that the Guaraní had known there was a God and had grasped something of His unity, and that you could tell as much from the name they gave Him. He had it backwards. The word was theirs, the God was his, and his own order had been pressing the identification on them for decades before he opened his dictionary.

Alfred Métraux said as much, and so did León Cadogan, who pointed out that Tupã comes last in the Mbyá theogony and lower still elsewhere. Curt Nimuendajú thought the figure had been bolted onto the Apapocúva myth cycle from outside altogether. The Jesuit anthropologist Bartomeu Melià called the whole business a semantic adventure and noted the irony of it: a minor god, made by Our Great Father and working at Our Mother’s direction, ended up as the supreme personal deity of a great many indigenous communities. Judith Shapiro traced the longer arc in 1987, from Tupã to the Land Without Evil, and showed that missionaries have been quarrying Tupi-Guaraní cosmology for translation equivalents ever since, with the borrowing now running in both directions.

Not everyone was taken in, and some of them enjoyed themselves. Father Franz Müller, collecting Mbyá songs in the nineteen thirties, printed one he introduced as a song of thanks to Tupã for a good hunt. The song is seven words long and the first three are Jakaira, Ñamandu and Karai. He rendered Ñamandu as “hail” and Karai as “sir” and confessed he could not follow the sense. The Mbyá had sung him the entire pantheon and let him write down the weather. The tactic has held: if outsiders are convinced the one true God is Tupã, then Tupã is who gets sung about while outsiders are in the room. A visiting nun still gets the Tupã songs.

The Tupã most Paraguayans meet first comes from a different kind of book. In the 1929 epic Ñande Ypy Kuéra, the poet Narciso R. Colmán gathered the country’s monsters into one cursed family, the seven sons of the spirit Tau and the sleeping girl Kerana, and made Tupã the power the people petition for deliverance. The sage Tumê Arandú prays; Tupã answers through a macaw with a plan; the plan requires a woman. Porãsy walks into Moñái’s cave alone, tells the serpent she has come to marry him, and asks only that his six brothers attend the wedding. Ten days later the brothers lie drunk and sleeping in Teju Jagua’s grotto, the village has ringed the hill in the dark, and Moñái wakes at the wrong moment and hauls her back inside. She shouts at them to seal the cave anyway. Afterwards Tupã lifts her out of the burning and sets her in the sky as the morning star. It is a fine story, and it is barely a century old. The whistle, the cave and the monsters are folk material; the family tree is Colmán’s.

What Tupã actually does is narrow and relentless. He raises the rain and withholds it. He makes the thunder and throws the lightning, and a storm that crosses from weather into punishment is read as an answer to some breach of the conduct the ancestors laid down, which in Mbyá reckoning increasingly means living the way white people live. He sends word-souls into unborn children, and with them half the names in a settlement. He cools what has overheated. He hauls water east across the sky to a country that has none.

What he does not do is make anything. The world was already standing when he was handed his share of it. He arrives last in the telling, he cannot act alone because the gods settle their business between them, and when the end of this earth is discussed the fire is usually Karai’s, the darkness Jakaira’s, or the cause is simply Ñamandu declining to send his son the sun back up in the morning. Being the god the strangers wanted has cost him as well. Four centuries of promotion have left a second Tupã standing beside the first, a Tupã of the whites, petitioned for shirts and shoes and food on the reasonable grounds that he seems to look after them better.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tupã in Guaraní mythology?

Tupã is the Guaraní god of rain, thunder and lightning, and the last of the four divine fathers created by Ñamandu in Mbyá-Guaraní cosmology. His assigned task is to carry water from the west across the sky to Karai in the east, letting it fall as rain on the way, and to cool an overheated world. He is not a creator god, despite centuries of writing that says otherwise.

Is Tupã the supreme god of the Guaraní?

No. Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries adopted the word Tupã as their translation for the Christian God in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s 1639 Guaraní dictionary defines Tupã simply as the name the people applied to God. Alfred Métraux, León Cadogan, Curt Nimuendajú and Bartomeu Melià all concluded that this promotion came from the missionaries rather than from Guaraní tradition, where Ñamandu is the first father and Tupã is one of four.

What does Tupã look like?

No source describes Tupã’s appearance. Four centuries of chronicles, missionary reports and field ethnography give him no body, no face and no attributes, because the Guaraní accounts they draw on do not describe one either. He is known by the sound of thunder, the flash of lightning and the storm arriving from the west.

How do the Guaraní pray to Tupã?

They ask him plainly and often argue with him. When crops need rain, people whose word-souls came from Tupã go to the stream to splash and play in the water while asking him to send it, and during violent storms it is normal to shout complaints at him for endangering the house. Respect for Tupã is expressed by staying quiet while a storm passes, not by adoration.

Did Tupã curse the seven monsters of Paraguayan legend?

Not in the older tradition. The familiar story in which Tau and Kerana produce seven monstrous sons comes from Narciso R. Colmán’s 1929 poem Ñande Ypy Kuéra, where Tupã is the god the sage Tumê Arandú petitions for help and who rewards the heroine Porãsy by turning her into the morning star. The individual monsters are genuine folk figures, but the family tree that links them is literature from the twentieth century.

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